One of my greatest fears in life is accidentally destroying art. Just clumsily backing into a sculpture that’s worth more than I am and sending it tumbling fatally to the ground as the artist weeps, with the work’s countless, shattered, priceless shards dripping through their fingers like sand. It keeps me awake at night. So Larry Bell’s ‘6X6 An Improvisation’ is a living nightmare for me. The six head-high glass cubes of the installation are barely held together – the towering sheets just balance against each other, bound only by glue. One good shove and bang, gone.
The veteran American artist has made a career out of making me nervous. His minimal geometric abstraction is a whirlwind of near-nothingness – everything is steely, barely-perceptible perfection.
There’s two series of works on paper here. One is stripes and ovals made of oxidised metal vapour; the other features swirling shapes covered in rainbows of clashing colours, like oil slicks on the ocean. These are cold, reductive, stark works of art. Bell removes everything that might get in the way of pure geometrics; he gets rid of emotion, interpretation, the whole lot.
The cubes of glass – some opaque, some metallic, some clear – pull the same trick, but on a human scale. They reflect you and obscure you, slice you in half, multiply you into infinity. You become a part of the maths, you become the abstraction.
By presenting you with nothing but an office cubicle of the future, with nothing but shapes, Bell gives you a choice: abandon yourself to it and become part of it, or walk away. Meditate or piss off. It’s ballsy, really. And you probably won’t knock it all over, don’t worry. The only thing you’re going to ruin is someone else’s selfie.
@eddyfrankel
